Abstract

Whilst in recent years a number of historians and sociologists have analysed
sports as social, cultural and economic processes, relatively few have considered the
cultural and ideological implications of sport as an object of representation. This
thesis aims to intervene in such debates by considering the emergence and
development of the discourse of cricket, a sport intimately associated with ideas of
"Englishness" and empire, and one with an unparalleled "Literary" tradition. In order
to account for the socially productive function of forms of literary discourse in
defining the hegemonic meaning of the cricket field, three interconnected discursive
processes are identified: Literaturisation, Canonisation and Aestheticisation. These
processes are related to broader manifestations of English cultural nationalism such as
the emergence of English Studies in the late nineteenth century. The main body of the
thesis is structured around the analysis of a series of historical moments (such as The
Great War and the 1926 General Strike), "discursive events" (for instance, the
"Bodyline" Series of 1932-33), and key writers and texts. As well as utilising its main
trinity of theoretical concepts, the analysis identifies patterns of repetition and
regularity within the changing patterns of cricket discourse. These analyses reveal that
the discursive meaning of cricket as a symbol of nation and empire was a matter of
constant renegotiation, and was consistently produced and reproduced as a response to
perceptions of socio-economic, political and cultural crisis. Because cricket discourse
was an agent of both imperial hegemony and anti-colonial counter-hegemony, the
analysis also considers its dissemination and cultural work within the colonial and
postcolonial dispensations. Through a reading of C.L.R. James's Beyond a Boundary, a theorisation of the relationship between the discursive and the performative emerges
as a means of accounting for the counter-hegemonic appropriation and re-articulation
of cricket into an instrument of postcolonial subjectivity and agency.